Storyboard

A storyboard is a graphic organizer that consists of simple illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence. The storyboarding process, in its modern form, was developed at Walt Disney Productions during the early 1930s, after several years of similar processes being in use at Walt Disney and other animation studios.

Origins

Most early filmmakers shot their films like a play, with a fixed camera in a wide shot. In the first decades of the 20th century, with the development of new film techniques, such as camera movement and cutting, many filmmakers began to find pre-planning with artists' sketches to be useful. Artists would sketch out ideas for gags or design sets, but at first these were largely conceptual.

Many large budget silent films were storyboarded, but most of this material has been lost during the reduction of the studio archives during the 1970s and 1980s. Special effects pioneer Georges Méliès is known to have been among the first filmmakers to use storyboards and pre-production art to visualize planned effects. However, storyboarding in the form widely known today was developed at the Walt Disney studio during the early 1930s. Up to this point, every animator was assigned a scene and had to come up with gags around a theme with no regard to how they worked as part of a narrative. In the biography of her father, The Story of Walt Disney (Henry Holt, 1956), Diane Disney Miller explains that the first complete storyboards were created for the 1933 Disney short Three Little Pigs.